Refugee Policies - The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

The crisis of the 1790s set the tone for the next century. The United
States would proclaim neutrality but permit refugees from foreign lands
undergoing war or revolution to settle in the United States. In the 1820s,
when the Greeks revolted against Turkish rule over Greece, most Americans
sympathized with the Greek cause, and they willingly received a few Greek
refugees in the United States. However, the official position of the
United States was the new Monroe Doctrine (1823). President James Monroe
declared that he expected European powers to refrain from ventures in the
Western Hemisphere and not attempt to halt the revolutionary process
there, and in return the United States would stay out of European affairs.

In 1831, Poles sought to overthrow Russian domination of their land. After
exchanges of notes between the United States and Russia, the former
remained neutral in the dispute and both powers agreed to a commercial
treaty in 1833. However, important American citizens expressed their
sympathy with the Poles and warmly welcomed several hundred Polish exiles
who fled when the rebellion failed and raised money to assist in their
settlement. Some Poles wanted Congress to grant them a tract of land in
the West that was to become a new Poland in America. The legislators,
while willing to permit the refugees to obtain land on the same terms as
all others, rejected the scheme.

Revolutions broke out once more in Europe in 1848, and when they failed,
thousands of refugees, chiefly Germans, fled to the United States. Once
again, many Americans hailed the principles of the
"forty-eighters" in their quest for constitutional
government in their homelands, but officially the United States government
elected to pursue a policy of neutrality. No case represents this position
more than that of Hungarian Lajos Kossuth. While American officials
proclaimed to the Austrians that they favored the principles of liberty
anywhere, and sympathized with those Hungarians seeking independence from
Austria, the United States did not intervene in the affairs of Hungary and
Austria. When the Hungarian leader Kossuth arrived in the United States in
1852, he drew large crowds, but there was no chance that America would
intervene in European affairs.

When the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, called the Fenian Brotherhood in
the United States, launched two attacks on Canada from the United States
in 1866 and 1870, America was faced with a diplomatic crisis or
embarrassment. As much as many Americans opposed English rule in Ireland,
the government moved to halt these assaults, which seemed to many to have
the flavor of a comic opera. Moreover, the United States was at peace with
Great Britain, and American officials said that the Irish question was
Britain's affair, not that of the United States.

In Latin America the United States pursued a different policy. Americans
sympathized with the Cuban revolt against Spain that began in 1868 and
lasted until the Spanish-American War (1898) ended Spanish rule. In the
early years of the rebellion, when conditions deteriorated for the rebels,
many sought asylum in the United States, where they settled in New York
and Florida and began to organize again to overthrow Spanish control.
American politicians demanded that Spain grant Cubans their independence.
Relations between the United States and Spain deteriorated in the 1890s,
and when the battleship
Maine
exploded in Havana's harbor, the cries for action led to a
congressional declaration of war in 1898. As a result of the ensuing
Spanish-American War, Cuba received independence but found itself closely
tied to America.